The problem of protecting an organization's sensitive data from access by unauthorized users is an increasingly important issue for essentially all businesses, government and agency organizations, as well as consumers. In response to the problem of unauthorized access, organizations often adopt a multi-layered approach to security, using some combination of perimeter systems (e.g., firewalls or authentication) and encryption technologies designed to mathematically encode data within a database.
Unfortunately, years of experience have demonstrated that even the most sophisticated perimeter and encryption technologies can be penetrated by determined attackers, with incidents of such vulnerabilities being both continuous and well-documented. Once such penetration occurs, unauthorized access has been gained to the actual data being protected, and the confidentiality of this data is at risk.